Launching into a new medium is a scary prospect, even for hugely experienced writer Anna Jordan, whose debut collection of poems, Decade, published by Broken Sleep Books, receives its intimate debut at a friendly and supportive event at the Poetry Café attended by fellow poets, writers and some friends and family via Zoom. Inspired by her poet father, who left a new verse under her mother’s pillow every day for a quarter of a century, Jordan’s poetry reveals a wealth of complex human experiences, emotions and challenges running alongside her successful play and TV writing career.
Jordan’s poetry collection reflects periods of work across a 10-year sequence of grief, love and all kinds of loss, some like Grief for Rookies written just five days after her mother’s death from cancer, a poem that Jordan deprecatingly refers to as “a Facebook status that got out of hand.” Jordan’s style, like her playwriting, is full of real, everyday detail, considering the ordinary administration that comes with loss and the constant futile expectation that emotion will burst ‘like a swollen thundercloud.’ Her Existential Crisis in a Premier Inn Hotel Room captures a particular enveloping grief, the vivid purple mundanity of the surroundings coming to life in the poem, as Jordan jokes with the audience about her obsession with niche but very British things.
Reading 12 poems in total from the book, Jordan includes a series of work about losing and finding love again with verse like Today My Heart is Full detailing a relationship breakdown while Horsebone Glue and How to Live in the Secret World are given more comic readings as the writer explores passion and sex with someone new, capturing a “violent happiness” in the writing that is nonetheless tinged with a constant knowledge that the world outside is still there, that the bubble will eventually burst. But as Jordan notes, this experience brought her back to poetry after a time away and the decision to pull together this collection.
One of the most moving sections of the collection focuses on multiple miscarriages and eventually giving birth to a son, balancing awe and relief with the cumulative pain of these events, many of which are drawn from Jordan’s diaries, which formed part of the inspiration for these works. This is a lifecycle a fellow poet notes in an introduction to the evening, or, as Jordan more modestly notes, that these are things that happened to her across this period. But there is balance in the work, death and love, grief and new life, loss and hope that leads to the final set of poems in which grandmother, mother and son share a connection and a passing down of life lessons and meanings.
Accompanied by readings from fellow poets, this intimate and friendly event has eased Anna Jordan into the beginning of a new decade and a new way to write the world she knows.
Decade is available from Broken Sleep Books.
